In the eyes of its natural supporters, the police force is beginning to look
and act like a law unto itself

Even before the shocking possibility opened up this week in the Andrew Mitchell affair – that serving police officers conspired to destroy a Cabinet minister – it was clear that something in the police was wrong.

England has 39 police forces, headed by 39 chief constables or commissioners. In the past 18 months, seven have been sacked for misconduct, suspended, placed under criminal or disciplinary investigation or forced to resign. That is not far off a fifth of the total.

In the same period, at least eight deputy or assistant chief constables have also been placed under ongoing investigation, suspended or forced out for reasons of alleged misconduct. No fewer than 11 English police forces – just under 30 per cent – have had one or more of their top leaders under a cloud.

Sean Price, chief constable of Cleveland, was sacked in October for gross misconduct and is on bail in a separate criminal investigation for corruption. In the same month, Sir Norman Bettison, chief constable of West Yorkshire, had to resign over his alleged role, which he denies, in concocting false information to smear the victims of the Hillsborough football disaster. He remains under investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, the IPCC.

Also in October, Gordon Fraser, assistant chief constable of Leicestershire, killed himself after being suspended over allegations of gross misconduct and fraud. With his partner, also a serving police officer, he had recently appeared in court on charges of perverting the course of justice.

Stuart Hyde, acting chief constable of Cumbria, has been suspended for alleged misbehaviour. Grahame Maxwell, chief constable of North Yorkshire, was found guilty of gross misconduct after assisting a relative in a recruitment exercise. Adrian Lee, chief constable of Northamptonshire, is under IPCC investigation for allegedly withholding crucial evidence from a murder trial. Mr Lee is “chair of professional ethics” for the Association of Chief Police Officers, ACPO.

Suzette Davenport, Mr Lee’s deputy at Northamptonshire, Jane Sawyers, assistant chief constable in Staffordshire, and Marcus Beale, assistant chief constable in the West Midlands, are under investigation in the same matter as Mr Lee. Adam Briggs, Mr Maxwell’s deputy in North Yorkshire, was disciplined, too, and has left the force. Derek Bonnard, Mr Price’s former deputy chief at Cleveland, is suspended. Craig Denholm, deputy chief constable of Surrey, is under IPCC investigation for allegedly failing to reveal that Milly Dowler’s voicemail had been hacked. David Ainsworth, deputy chief constable of Wiltshire, hanged himself after facing allegations of sexual misconduct from 13 different women.

Most of these cases have barely been reported outside the local press. But they add up to the most serious spate of alleged wrongdoing at senior levels in the history of the police. And of course, in July 2011, the most high-profile scalps of all, Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson and his assistant commissioner, John Yates, were claimed at Scotland Yard after the Metropolitan Police’s calamitous failings in the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.

At lower ranks, in the three years to April 2011 – that is, even before “Hackgate” broke – there was a 55 per cent rise in referrals to the IPCC for corruption, from 215 cases to 333. And in a decade, the overall number of complaints made each year against the police has roughly doubled – from 15,248 to 30,143 – though there has been a decline in the last two years.

Even before the shocking possibility opened up by “Plebgate”, the police have been plagued by scandal and incompetence. We now learn that one of the reasons why the Metropolitan Police did nothing about the systematic criminality of the News of the World was because some officers were in the paper’s pocket, or even on its payroll.

There were the riots, the most serious breakdown in order in 30 years, when the capital and many major cities were effectively no longer under the rule of law. They developed slowly – over three days – and could almost certainly have been stopped had police dealt more firmly with the first night of violence, which was confined to one London borough. Instead, they allowed the centres of Wood Green and Tottenham Hale to be ransacked and burned for an entire night, as news cameras broadcast the pictures to the world. As one London Labour MP, Diane Abbott, put it, the Met’s failure to intervene “gave the green light to every little hooligan in London to come out on the following days to loot and steal”.

There is the G20 killing, when we learnt that PC Simon Harwood, the officer who pushed Ian Tomlinson to the ground, causing his death, had a foot-long record of allegedly punching, throttling, kneeing or threatening suspects; that he had been forced to resign after altering his notes to justify an illegal arrest; but that he had then been almost immediately re-employed by the police and had returned to serve in one of the Met’s most sensitive units.

Most stunningly, there was the gigantic conspiracy of Hillsborough, where a special team of South Yorkshire police chiefs and solicitors systematically rewrote more than a hundred statements by their own officers to deflect blame from the force for the disaster, in which 96 Liverpool football fans died, and place it on the victims instead. This has now triggered the biggest independent investigation into police wrongdoing in British history.

Yet, through everything, the police have managed to undermine many attempts at reform. Elected police commissioners, this Government’s key initiative, were originally supposed to be chosen alongside local councillors in the sunshine of May, guaranteeing at least a minimum turnout and legitimacy. But police interests, and the Liberal Democrats, kept the legislation so long in the Lords that the Government had to postpone the election to the cold and dark of November, producing the lowest turnouts on record.

Police commissioners were supposed to be credible figures, with real standing in their communities. In the original Bill, criminal record disqualifications were the same as for any other public office. But ACPO successfully promoted amendments, far tougher even than for police officers themselves, barring anyone convicted of a potentially imprisonable offence in their entire lives. That conveniently disqualified several of the best candidates, including Bob Ashford, a former Youth Justice Board director who had been fined £5 as a 13-year-old in 1966.

Even the initial dilatory approach to the riots, some people in Government suspect, may have involved an element of police politics. “On the first day, we cannot help wondering whether the very muted response was somebody’s attempt to make a point about the cuts and the shortage of police resources,” says one person close to the former Metropolitan Police Authority. “To be fair, I think they were as horrified as the rest of us afterwards at the way it took off.”

In any tight corner, the police still have overwhelming advantages. Juries will almost never convict police officers. Elections tend to be fought on the odd assumption that the effectiveness of a police force is measured by the number of people it employs. Politicians know that in any quarrel with the police, the public will always choose the men and women in uniform. Why else did Mr Mitchell not directly accuse his accusers of lying?

With Plebgate, however, Tory tolerance of police politicking may have reached its limit. The Police Federation has shown regret at jumping on the scandal to promote its pay and conditions claims. Mr Mitchell was lied about by at least one Federation leader, and now says he has lost confidence in the Met commissioner. David Davis, the former shadow home secretary, has called the police version of events “simply nonsense”.

Mr Mitchell got into trouble in a way that lots of law-abiding people will recognise: losing his temper at some apparently arbitrary manifestation of police authority. He had always been allowed to ride his bike through the Downing Street gates before. It was the police who suddenly, and without any clear reason, decided to prohibit it.

In a tiny way, the Mitchell incident might illustrate the growing feeling among respectable folk that the police can sometimes be a law unto themselves. And in a bigger way it illustrates perhaps the greatest problem of all: the breakdown in relations between the police, and the people – both big and small-C conservatives – who should be their natural supporters.

If a conspiracy is proved, it will be a deeply dangerous moment for the police.